For future reference, Notepad will only recognize "\r\n", not "\r" or
"\n" alone. Also, use Wordpad or Notepad++ instead.

Further reading:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vclanguage/thread/cba503b1-a0e2-4a64-a970-f735c5bc1c90
http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?t=9069

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 7:57 PM, Ken Irwin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Jonathan's questions were right on target. I was opening the files in the standard MS Notepad editor, and it was not observing line breaks. When I went to go open the files in MiniTab they were just fine. (Changing the files to .txt and text/plain did *not* fix the problem in Notepad, and I do wonder what it would take to make that program happy, but in this case it doesn't much matter.)
>
> Thanks for the help
> Ken
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
> Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 3:41 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] data export help: line breaks on tab-delimited download
>
> line breaks don't appear when you view it with what software?
>
> Can you have your browser save it to disk after it prompts you to do so,
> and open with a reliable text editor you know how to use and confirm if
> \n is really still in the file or not?
>
> If you are viewing it in your web brower, then your web browser is
> probably deciding to display it as HTML. The line breaks are probably
> still there, the web browser is just displaying as HTML. Web browsers
> aren't great places to view text.  If you are viewing it after saving it
> to disk, then your web browser probably won't know to display as text
> unless the filename ends in ".txt".  If you are viewing it without
> saving to disk (but then why are you using
> Content-Disposition:attachment?), then make sure you're still setting
> the content-type appropriately; and you may need to make the filename
> end in .txt anyway.
>
> The line breaks are probably still there, your web browser is just
> rendering the file as html rather than txt, is my guess.
>
> On 1/11/2011 3:29 PM, Ken Irwin wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've got a dataset that I'm trying to make exportable for MiniTab, etc. It's tab-delimited and lines end with "\n".
>>
>> When I serve it up as "text/plain" and view it in my web browser, it works just fine and all the line breaks are in the right places.
>>
>> When I send the header to make it a downloadable "attachment":
>> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="categories.tab"
>> Then there are no line breaks at all - it's all one line, and the line-breaks don't appear.
>>
>> I tried "\r" instead, and that didn't work either.
>>
>> Any idea what I might be doing wrong here?
>>
>> Thanks
>> Ken
>>
>